Monday, December 22, 2008

George Will doesn't like it either

George Will is not known as a flaming leftist liberal.But he has often been a harsh crisitc of GW Bush.

And he thinks very little of the administration's use of TARP funds for the auto industry. At least the fact that the administration has made Congress moot:

The president is dispensing money from the $700 billion Congress provided for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The unfounded assertion of a right to do this is notably brazen, given the indisputable fact that if Congress had known that TARP -- supposedly a measure for scouring "toxic" assets from financial institutions -- was to become an instrument for unconstrained industrial policy, it would not have been passed...

The administration has not confined its aggrandizement of executive power to national security matters....

Most of the administration's executive truculence has pertained to national security, where the case for broad prerogatives, although not as powerful as the administration supposes, is at least arguable. With the automakers, however, executive branch overreaching now extends to the essence of domestic policy -- spending -- and traduces a core constitutional principle, the separation of powers...